All the lost places, p.37
All the Lost Places, page 37
Massimo turned slowly, doge’s scepter still at his side. Stooped to watch as Sebastien struggled to his knees and then to his feet.
Sebastien gripped the quayside hard, the rough edge of crumbled palazzo-turned-pavement nearly puncturing his palm. He struggled to stand and water ran from his sleeves, down his fingers, splashing onto the ground. He gripped his side where he bled warm against the cold. Teeth chattering beyond his control, he stepped toward Massimo.
The man smirked. Shook his head in mock pity. And pulled something dark and pointed from his boot.
A dagger.
“You should have stayed in the canal where you belong,” Massimo said, words low, seething. “Let it take you . . . once and for all. Swamp rat.”
He advanced. Raised his dagger to stomach level . . . and thrust.
Quick to the side Sebastien stepped, evading the kill and releasing from his own hand the fallen piece of palazzo he had gripped—his only defense.
It met its mark with a solid sound that sickened Sebastien, but it afforded enough time for him to stumble back and let that perpetually crumbling palazzo catch him, brace him, as he watched the fall of an empire before him, in the form of a man.
For there, the Greatest Faithful, the self-christened last hope of Venice—Massimo Fedele fell to his knees, scepter dropping from his hand and rolling toward Sebastien.
A creeping dark river snaked from his leg, where his fallen dagger caught his fall, crippling him in his tracks.
He tried to stand, but fell again. Sebastien lunged but could not reach him as Massimo slipped into the canal, chin knocking the edge of the dock as he went, until a solid splash swallowed him whole.
“Sebastien?” Mariana’s voice, from the hall of statues.
No. No, no . . . She could not see this.
Feet moving faster than thought could arrive in his mind, he lunged for the scepter and splayed himself out upon the surface of the dock, heedless of his body’s protest.
“Come back,” he said, staring into the black abyss.
Nothing. Only the shine of moonlight upon water, upon the trail of blood beside him.
“Come back. Please.” Gritting teeth, the words climbed as if they, too, were desperate for air.
Nothing.
The creaking of a hinge as the door opened behind him and he knew, in the strong and quiet presence, who it was.
He whispered a final plea. “Come. Back.”
He held his breath. A bubble breached the surface, and then another—and then the man himself.
Lightning fast, instinct surpassed thought, and all was a blur of water and man, limb and land as he extended the scepter. Gripped Massimo’s hand around it to keep it from sliding as the brass slipped and protested beneath the clutch of wet hands. Sebastien pulled him, though his own lifeblood spilled the more, onto the dock.
Massimo sputtered, coughed, his leg hanging limp. There was a man crouching then, dressing the wound, binding his wrists, with equal parts care and conviction, throwing concerned looks Sebastien’s way as if unsure which patient to treat first.
Sebastien’s hearing blurred in and out, his vision too. Distinct glimpses of Mariana bending over him, stroking his face, taking his hand in hers. And then the man she had gone to fetch—Angelo—bent over him to begin his ministrations.
Something cool and steady against his face, his side. A low voice asking questions, words garbled in the sluggish echo of blood snaking through Sebastien’s mind and ears.
“. . . all right?” the voice asked. “Tell me where you are.”
But that was not a voice of a stranger. It was familiar, so familiar.
The man’s hand gripped his shoulder with the touch of a father as he began to speak old lines that covered him like a blanket. Words slipped in and out of his hearing, coming in snatches:
“Ancient waters, secrets keep . . . rios long . . . places deep. Hear them ring in kindest dreams . . . let them sing you off to sleep. . . .”
The voice of the man who had told him a thousand stories and taught him how to print them too. Why, then, did Mariana call him Angelo?
It was her face, so near now, asking one more question. “Do you know who you are?”
And the answer, crystal clear and sharp as glass, pierced the fog consuming him.
“I . . . am . . . found.”
44
The Book of Waters
Precium
On a somber summer day, the Greatest Faithful traversed the infamous Bridge of Sighs, shackled for high treason and intent for insubordination to the occupying forces. He lingered over his last look at his beloved city before being jostled onward, shut away in the prison cells of the very palace from whence he had meant to reign. Here he was to remain, the remainder of his days. But in Venice, in these times, nothing was certain.
This, he saw proved from his cell, where he watched a revolution unfold. The air was filled with word of it—from guards and voices from the canals. Daniele Manin, imprisoned just like Massimo Fedele, had his freedom forced in the throes of the uprising. Manin was victorious, it seemed—and Venice was in Venetian hands . . . for now.
“It will not last,” said the chess player, always thinking ten steps ahead.
And it did not. Though Venice enjoyed a tenuous stint of independence, she was soon beset with troubles. An explosion of a magazine. A wave of cholera, ruthless in its timing. The bombardment of Venice by Austria from land and from sea. Dwindling food and rising unrest.
Daniele Manin, loathe to see his beloved Venice suffer, negotiated amnesty for all but him and a few others, who would be subject to exile.
“Others,” it seemed, included The Greatest Faithful. A key opening his cell, only to imprison him away from his very purpose.
Before he departed the city for the last time, he awoke in his cell to five faces bent over his. He startled, bolting upright and flattening himself against the cold wall at his back as he took them in. Five souls he knew not, though he was intimately connected to, their roots twisting afar into history around seven seats and a stone table.
The ones his ancestor had left behind.
And now, like all that history had bound itself up into this moment, Angelo—Dante, it seemed his given name was—stepped forward, arm outstretched.
Massimo did not take the proffered hand. How could he?
So Dante closed the space between them. Elena handed him a basket, and Dante offered it to Massimo.
“Supplies,” he said simply. “For the journey ahead.”
Massimo pressed harder into the cold wall, shaking his head. “I have not earned this,” he said. The broken battle cry pulsing silently in the cell.
I am nothing.
In his time within this cage, he had counted bars. Weighed deeds. Calculated atonement. The current of the rising equation rising, wrapping tight around him, pulling him under.
“I can never pay the price of my past. Of my family.”
Angelo dropped his gaze, considering. That soul of a poet, storing up words he could never write.
“The question is not the price of a man,” he said. “That has already been paid. The question . . . is that of a man’s worth. His value.”
Massimo’s jaw worked, gaze boring into the ground.
“Not quantum,” Dante spoke in Massimo’s currency of words. “But precium.”
At the sound of the word of ransom and redemption, of value, Massimo’s eyes pressed closed, a silent battle waging for the man’s soul.
The guild retreated, revealing in their wake the presence of another.
One man, bearing two gifts.
The first, a coin. “I believe this is yours,” the man said. He reached through the bars, meeting his brother-in-law’s eyes and pleading silently. “You gave it to me as a warning when I was a child. To remember my mortality. I return it to you with one small change . . . And I bring you this.” He handed him a flower. Oleander. White and true, the same blossom that had crowned his sister on her wedding day.
When the visitor left, Massimo turned the coin in his hand. Where once it had scrawled the ominous, angular words Memento Mori, the latter word had been rubbed away and etched with one word: Vita.
Life.
———
“Take me home?” Mariana’s voice, music to Sebastien’s ears, made this simple request. It was time, they both knew. Time to cease speaking of resting and protecting her days. Her days were too precious to be guarded now. They were so few, they opened their arms and begged to be filled.
And so, he rowed his bride across the lagoon. Lifted her from the boat, over the island threshold she had once traversed barefoot. The waves tiptoed up onto the bank, as if they, too, wished to help see her home.
The Guild had known she was coming. Valentina had adorned the bed with a blanket edged in finest lace. Pietro had lined her windowsill in bright glass vases to catch the light and make it dance for her. His grandchildren visited and nestled about her bed like birds in a nest, and she delighted in distributing to them her most cherished trinkets: a chipped cup depicting a storm-tossed ship, a pen she had used to write letters to a certain boatman, a mask edged in scrolling silvery-blue peaks and curls.
Their chatter and gentle bouncing energy as they soaked in her presence seemed to fill her heart in unseen places, as if she were imagining the future rolling out before each of them like a grand adventure. A future that would someday take their family lines off to distant shores where, even as the home fires burned strong in their Murano glass shop, new family businesses would open too: a Boston restaurant spicing the air with garlic, cheese, herbs, and music from the old country, swirling it even into dark wartime nights. And a San Francisco bakery spinning sugar and delight into Washington Square Park from a pie-slice building with a mural from the brush of a courageous young boy.
Elena was in and out all day, each day, with tender ministrations of tea and bread, song and smiles. Giuseppe, timid and unsure despite all his usual bluster and bravado, waved his large hand through the window with a sheepish grin, showing his empty fishing line—how he had set them all free in her honor.
Dante came the next day, bringing with him a blank volume, bound with care, its ends marbled with all the same hues of her dress from the night of the masquerade.
“Angelo.” She smiled and took his hand. “It was you, wasn’t it? The man in the boat passing the island when I was healing?”
The quiet dip of his head was answer enough. “I saw that you were in good hands,” he said. “It was all I needed to know.”
“Always looking out for us,” she said, adoration in her eyes.
“From the moment you were both born,” he said.
Sebastien’s brow furrowed. “Do you mean from the moment Giuseppe found me?”
Dante smiled. “How do you think you came to be set adrift in the direction of a fishmonger and not an orphanage?”
Sebastien sputtered. “Massimo . . . told the truth? It—it wasn’t an accident?”
“Life is no accident, Sebastien. Your mother’s people once occupied one of the stone seats. She knew if there was a safe place for you to grow up in tumultuous times like yours have been, it was in the care of such as these.” He looked with quiet fondness upon the beloved band of artisans.
“It was you all along,” Sebastien said, and Mariana’s eyes gleamed. This man with his ink-stained hands . . . was the hero of this tale. All of the guild were. “Thank you, Dante.”
To Mariana, Dante turned and said, “You are a treasure, Mariana Trovato. Like Venice itself.”
“Venice,” she said, her deep love for the place resounding in her sigh. “Now, there is a story worth telling.”
Sebastien would record that story for her in the days that followed. The ache of his soul in every stroke of the pen, for he knew how Mariana had longed to be a mother one day. And he heard how every bit of that love, the magic she would have spun for her own children, was given with abandon to the small histories she wished to place in the hands of children who were like she had once been. Who needed to know of the city that came from a swamp . . . a lost place that grew hope. She spoke the words, and he wrote them. She sketched the pictures, and he carved them into woodblocks, to be inked and printed someday.
At night, he took to recording their own tale. Beginning with the inscription—For my bride—and desiring that the tale would be kept close and safe by the members of the guild as long as they lived. And after that? Wherever the story landed, perhaps it might be a lifeline to some searching soul who wondered, like Sebastien, Who am I?
Wary of Massimo Fedele, whose future was yet to be determined, Sebastien planned to leave off the ending in all of the copies but one. The older man had proved he would go to great lengths to bury the shadows of his family. If he discovered this tale . . .
So, he would inscribe the ending by hand in only one. Build upon the island a vault, in the hands of the safest place he knew: the ancient waters. Keep the book dry in a glass vessel crafted with care by Pietro, for a soul who might one day discover this living story, when all was well and safe.
The days stretched mercifully, bending around conversations to be cherished, moments to hold hands, glimpses of sunsets and sunrises and clouds moving over them, come from the mountains to the north to bid their friend farewell.
One afternoon, Mariana stirred from a deep sleep, fluttered her eyes open and gazed at Sebastien.
“I remember you,” she said. He leaned forward, concerned. Was she struggling to remember him? “I saw you from the terrace.”
His concern grew, the word delirium twisting in his gut, for there was no terrace here.
“With your trousers pulled high . . . you had one green shoe and one brown, and the way you held that basket of fish made me think you might topple into the canal.”
He laughed, fear fleeing as he recalled a vision of his youthful self knocking at the grand door of Ca’Fedele. “That canal was always waiting for its chance to gulp me down, wasn’t it?”
She smiled, the gentle curves of her mouth soft. “Or baskets were always waiting to carry you to your destiny.” She offered the quip and then grew serious. “What would have happened, Sebastien?”
He threaded his fingers through hers, willing away the ticking of time. “What would have happened?”
She closed her eyes, forehead flickering concern or concentration as she retrieved a memory. “I heard my brother call you names, and I stood up and plucked a geranium blossom from the window box and tried to toss it at him. But I was too late. He had closed the door, and you—I thought you might spit at it or curse him. But do you know what you did?”
He shook his head. All he recalled from that long-ago day was that he couldn’t disappear quickly enough, make his delivery and vanish from the ill-fated naivety of his actions.
“I remember it,” she said. “The sun was on you, and you turned to go, but paused. You stooped to pick up a ducat from the step. It was black and golden—I remember the way the coin glinted in the sun, there in your open palm. Good, I thought. Good, take it. You deserved it, and a thousand more, for the way he treated you. I wanted you to put it in your pocket and go and have a wonderful life. But then . . .”
A flash of memory, as he recalled the glint of a coin in his hand. He did remember it, just the shadow of an image.
“You turned again and knocked on the door once more and gave it to the majordomo, saying it belonged to the house. You were so good, even then.” She met his eyes, her smile sad. “What would have happened if I had spoken with Massimo then and there? Tossed the geranium at his head quicker? Would I—would I have saved you, Sebastien? Saved your chance at a more just life?”
Sebastien felt every apprehension for how he would answer her question drop away. “Is that what is troubling you?”
A tear escaped the corner of her eye, speaking her answer without words. He lifted his hand, lifted the tear away.
“I would be very glad to have known you then,” he said, weighing his words carefully. “But Mariana—” He shook his head, struggling to find words that would ease her burden and not wound her further. “I don’t believe a flower would have changed Massimo’s course,” he said as gently as he could. Hoped the truth, though it was a hard one, might lift her burden of wondering.
“You haven’t seen me throw,” she said, quirking a brow.
He laughed, and it felt like hope. “Even with a legendary ability like yours.” He smiled. “Massimo had been on his course for a very long time. His actions—they are not yours.” His jaw worked as he struggled to find a kind angle for how he had treated her.
She seemed to sense the direction of his thoughts. “I was expendable,” she said.
“Never.”
“To him . . . I was just a bargaining chip. I have always been expendable.”
Sebastien stood, placing his other hand around hers so that she was safe within his two hands, as if that might turn back time, place her in his care, set him in a place where he could defend and protect her sooner, so much sooner.
“You—” His voice was husky. The ache in his throat—it singed the words with gravity. “Are not expendable. You . . . are treasured.”
“I have a confession,” she said.
“You don’t need to—”
“Will you deny a dying woman the rite of confession?” Mischief sparked from her, but her words were too true to respond to in the light way she intended it.
Sebastien held her hand tighter. “Say anything you like,” he said at last.
“I am a thief,” she said.
He shook his head. “You had nothing to do with what your brother did—”
“Look in my shoe,” she said.
Picking up her boots from their place by the door, he shook them out until something small and round dropped into his waiting palm.
A coin of black and gold, gleaming up at him from the past—right here in the present. The ducat.
“I took it, that day. Snuck it from the house coffers where the majordomo put it. I . . . needed to be reminded of someone kind,” she said. “In the years that followed, whenever things were difficult, I would go to my room, take out that coin, hold it in my hands, and close my eyes as I remembered the boy with the basket. I would whisper, ‘There is someone good and kind in this world.’ And I would pray to God in heaven to give that boy a good and very rich life. That he would defend that boy, where I had failed.”
